Tag Archives: Awards

We are announcing the call for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2018, which will be presented this July at the State of the Map 2018 conference in Milan!

These are community awards, as nominees and winners are chosen by the community. The Awards strive to be a worldwide event for all OpenStreetMap members, including developers, mappers, community leaders, blog writers and everyone else. We need your help to find the best of OpenStreetMap globally.

We will have the same categories as the last year, including three regional categories for Asia, Africa and Latin America. We strive for increasing the diversity and expect to see more great nominees who the larger community has not been aware yet. This is your chance to make yourself or people you admire visible to the entire world. Add your nominees on the awards website!

We’re mostly looking for new innovations, so only projects/works that were announced after July 1st 2017 are eligible. The Ulf Möller Award is an exception to this. Everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project. Winners of past awards and selection committee members (in their categories) cannot be nominated.

The call for nominees will close on 31th of May. Whenever you see an interesting entry on OSM diaries or in WeeklyOSM, take a moment to submit the name for the award. The more nominees we have, the more interesting the final voting will be. Please keep in mind that we have the OpenStreetMap Awards and nominate people!

DINACon digital sustainability

The OpenStreetMap community recently received an award at the DINACon conference on digital sustainability.

OpenStreetMap is showing itself to be sustainable in various ways. Our database is available to download in its entirety, which helps to ensure the hard work of our contributors will always live on regardless, but our core servers keep humming thanks to many generous donations to OSMF over the years, as well as funding from our corporate membership programme. Most important of all, our community continues to thrive, attracting new members, while retaining wonderfully dedicated long-term contributors (to whom this award was dedicated). Thank you to everyone who helps make OpenStreetMap sustainable.

Thanks also to Simon Poole, Stefan Keller, and Michael Spreng who accepted the award, as well as running an OpenStreetMap session at this conference.

While we’re on the topic of awards…

OpenStreetMap Awards 2017

During our own conference, the international State Of the Map, in Japan back in August, we held the OpenStreetMap Awards ceremony. If you missed it, these are the results:

The Influential Writing Award went to Ramani Huria – Great blog posts about community, mapping, techniques for OpenStreetMap in Tanzania and Africa.

The Greatness in Mapping Award went to Jochen Topf – For the global polygon fixing effort, which updated all the old-style multipolygons and continues to fix thousands of errors every day

The Expanding the Community Award went to Pete Masters – For 4 years as Missing Maps project coordinator, introducing countless contributors to OSM, supporting communities in Bangladesh, DRC, CAR and many other countries. Remarkable outreach for humanitarian mapping & OSM in general.

The Improving Latin America Award went to GeoChicas – Working against sexism and making projects to integrate OSM’s users

The Improving Asia Award went to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Indonesia – For training disabled people and their carers to map the areas they live. A great example of how inclusivity and diversity can by both fostered and supported by OpenStreetMap

The Ulf Möller Memorial Award went to Martin Raifer – For the Overpass Turbo web based data mining tool.

The OSM awards website has a list of all nominees, and details of why they were nominated (also on this blog). Well worth a read. It’s a catalogue of spectacular individual contributions made to OpenStreetMap throughout the 2016/2017, and all of these nominees deserve our congratulations.

The community voting for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2017 is open! During the call for nominees you submitted more than a hundred of them. Then a number of active community members have prepared a shorter list. Now it is again your turn: choose who gets an award at the ceremony at the State of the Map in Japan.

This time you would need to consider 45 nominees in 9 categories. That is a tiny fraction of active community members who did good in the past year, but still a lot to choose from. To make your task simpler, we have made a couple of changes.

You don’t have to select only one nominee for a category: that was a hard choice last year, and most of the time you’d wish you had more votes. Now you have! Choose as many as you like, even all of them. This process is called Approval Voting: studies show it is much fairer that the regular one-vote voting, and much easier to understand than STV. The winner is still determined by the number of votes.

And do use the fact that you can change or add to your votes at any time until the voting ends (that would be on 16th of August). We will cover all nominees in this blog, so you could make an informed choice. Starting right now, with the two technical categories. Nominees are listed in a random order.

Core Systems Award

For outstanding contributions to any of the core tools, systems, processes or resources. Not limited to systems under OSMF control. The Rails port, mapnik, and any other tool that mappers use on a daily basis, knowingly or not, are eligible.

Hartmut Holzgraefe: the old MapOSMatic service for printing atlases went offline, but Hartmut set up the fork last year. And he did not stop at that: every week he is improving it in different ways. He has the biggest collection of map styles ready for printing. He added email notifications and fixed UI issues. You can even add your data on top of the map.

Bryan Housel: you know iD, our amazing web-based editor. Bryan is supervising its development. Recently he has added a tutorial to it, and it is years ahead of what other OSM software offer. That tutorial even has an entire imaginary town to play with!

Andy Allan: he has been improving OSM in small ways long before, but just a month ago Andy joined the website maintainers team and immediately started working on improving the code. And before that he upgraded all the tests for the website: important, but not very fun work, we guess.

Kevin Bullock: as an employee of DigitalGlobe, he has been always asked at State of the Map conferences about new satellite imagery for OpenStreetMap. This Spring, due to his efforts, we finally got two new imagery layers. You must have already seen them in your editor of choice.

Paul Norman and Matthijs Melissen: for more than half a year these two had been working on a major refactoring of our map style, the one you’ve liked even after roads changed their colours. Now all the rendering databases were reloaded, and style designers can finally use any tags they like: surface, covered, public_transport, you name it.

A slide from the 2016 ceremony

Innovation Award

For the best new service or approach. New tools for contributing data, image recognition, trace or OSM data analysis, new mapping approach or new perspective on old tools.

Michael Straßburger: do “telnet mapscii.me” in a console, and you will see a map of the whole world, rendered with letters and punctuation. MapSCII is a brilliant example of all our map rendering technologies at work: vector tiles from the last year winner OSM2VectorTiles, mapbox GL styles, vector transformations. While visually simple, it proves we can do anything with our map.

Yuri Astrakhan: people have long used SPARQL queries with Wikidata, and Yuri’s service links that with the spatial OSM database using 750 thousand “wikidata” keys we have. Now you can query for cities more than 2000 years old or get first ascension time for mountain peaks and get OSM identifiers for these.

OpenTopoMap maintainers: made by Stefan, Philipp and Martin, OpenTopoMap renders the whole world in a topographic style falimiar to tourists and hikers. It also provides weekly updated Garmin extracts, so you don’t have to buy paper maps for a trip.

Tobias Zwick: he is the author of the StreetComplete android map editor. Announced just in March, it has taken mappers by the storm, with half a million edits made by 5000 users. The app makes it very easy to map important properties of roads and amenities. Tobias constantly improves the app and listens to the comments on mailing lists and on GitHub.

Sajjad Anwar: visualizing changesets is one of the hardest problems in OpenStreetMap. Most of us has been using Achavi, but it is slow due to the nature of requests to Overpass API. Sajjad removed the need for querying by creating a cache of all recent changesets, so visualizing takes less than a second. His work is already used by the OSMCha, a validation tool, and could possibly be integrated into the OSM website.

Now that you know what these ten nominees did, head to the OSM Awards website and click on these you think should get an award for their work. We’ll return next week to look at writing and mapping categories.

The Innovation Award went to Manuel Roth and Lukas Martinelli for OSM2VectorTiles.

The Influential Writing Award went to the WeeklyOSM Team for their weekly news blog.

The Greatness in Mapping Award went to Martin Ždila for mapping a lot of hiking routes.

The Expanding the Community Award went to Pascal Neis for his community maps.

The Ulf Möller Memorial Award went to Frederik Ramm.

All the nominees are doing important work for improving OpenStreetMap, making it better and more visible. We cannot thank you enough! Also thanks to everyone who voted and to these who spend their hours on the open maps. Please continue the good work, and prepare to nominate each other for the next awards. See you next year!

Announcing the OpenStreetMap Awards, awarded for the first time this September at the State of the Map 2016 conference in Brussels!

This is a community award: nominees and winners are chosen by the community. We are now opening the Call for Nominees, to learn more about the amazing contributors to OpenStreetMap. The Awards strive to be a worldwide event for all OpenStreetMap members, including developers, mappers, community leaders, blog writers and everyone else. We need your help to find the best of OpenStreetMap globally.

Add your nominees on the awards website. There are six categories: Core Systems, Innovation, Writing, Mapping, Community and the Ulf Möller Memorial Award. You can nominate up to ten people, groups or organizations for each category. Eligible are projects or works that were announced after August 1st, 2015, except for the Ulf Möller Award, for which everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project.

The call for nominees will close August 27th, and shortly after that we will start the second round, choosing the award recipients. Please nominate!